Starchildren setting, HeroQuest rules.

[Rob MacDougall]

Hi, folks:

I'm about to run a game set in the Starchildren world of glam alien rock stars versus a crushing conformist state, but using HeroQuest as the system. This may seem like an odd match, but while I loved the Starchildren premise and setting, I wasn't enthralled with the system, and I've been wanting to try out HeroQuest for a while.  And I think a system that lets me run blistering guitar duels with the same level of detail as brawling combat will be a good fit for Starchildren. We'll see.

(I wasn't sure whether to put this in the HeroQuest forum or the XIG Games (Starchildren) forum, so I decided to punt the question and put it in Actual Play. It's only Actual Play Prep at the moment, I admit, but our first session is on Monday, and I'll post here after that with thoughts on how it went.)

(Tangent: There are actually a few minor structural similarities between the Starchildren and HQ rules:  the Backgrounds in Starchildren character generation work much like HQ Keywords, and the musical performance rules amount to a series of rolls for augments.)

I wrote a couple of handouts to introduce the players to the setting, including the minor tweaks I made (adding a few factions, changing a few names). They're on the web here (Initial Overview, Mother, & Meme War) and here (Starchildren, Darkchildren, Velvet & the Mob). The Keywords we used for character generation are here (Starchild/HQ Keywords) and a long goofy list of Exalted-style charms (taking the place of HQ magic and Starchild "mojo") are here (Glamours). Please do check them out if you're interested in Starchildren or HQ. Comments welcome.

My prep for this game has been heavily influenced by discussions here at the Forge of Sorcerer-prep and Narrativist HeroQuest play: The players have written Kickers, and I've worked up an R-Map and bangs, about which I'll post more once we've gotten started. Right now, we're in the process of refining and spiking the Kickers.

In part I just wanted to post this because I thought the Setting handouts would be interesting to Starchildren fans and the Keywords to people who want to see what can be done with HeroQuest. But I do have some immediate questions that people with HeroQuest experience in particular might have thoughts on:

1. In terms of character points, we used the numbers for starting Hero Quest characters (keywords start at 17, other skills at 13, 20 additional points, etc.). But it occurs to me that HeroQuest is, for all its innovations, still rooted in that fantasy RPG paradigm where characters start out weak and inexperienced and grow powerful over a long period of time. Nothing wrong with that, but our Starchildren game is only going to run a handful of sessions, and the characters are supposed to be big deal rock stars and the like from the very start. So I'm wondering: should I up the starting point totals and skill levels? If so, by how much? I could just lower the whole scale so that, say, 27 or 7w1 in a skill actually is world-class but, not having played a lot of HeroQuest, I wonder if this might have unforseen effects on game play. So, HQ veterans: have you ever played a game where you wanted the PCs to be big time movers and shakers right out of the gate? How did you handle character generation and skill levels?

2. Back when Starchildren first came out, I was struck by comments here at the Forge that said, essentially, "Cool game, but why is there so much emphasis on combat?" That's one of the reasons I decided to use the HQ rules. When we sat down to do character generation, I pointed out to my players that their characters could take all manner of skills - relationships, passions, musical abilities, etc. - and shouldn't feel limited to standard RPG-type abilities like combat and sneaking around. Boy, did they take me at my word! I think out of six PCs, maybe one has anything resemblig a combat ability. Which is very cool, and it sends a strong signal to me about what sort of a story the players are interested in. But after years and years of gaming I do wonder about my ability to get out of an instinctive "action movie" mindset that says: the dice come out when fists start flying. Anyone out there have advice for keeping things exciting, and keeping the stakes high when the focus is not on physical peril to the PCs?

Thanks in advance for any thoughts.

Rob

[Scripty]

1. So, HQ veterans: have you ever played a game where you wanted the PCs to be big time movers and shakers right out of the gate? How did you handle character generation and skill levels?

There are rules in HQ for creating more powerful characters. One thing I might consider is using the chart in the Hero's Book that puts ratings in perspective with how skilled a person might be in a particular area. That would be fairly easy to extrapolate values from to get an idea of the level of skill you're talking about (which, IMO, would be between 21/1w and 45/5w2). Other ideas I've seen thrown around is to start a keyword (or all keywords) at 1w and increase starting character points as well.

2. Anyone out there have advice for keeping things exciting, and keeping the stakes high when the focus is not on physical peril to the PCs?

Conflict doesn't have to be about combat. Think Purple Rain. Actual physical combat isn't much of an issue in that movie yet there is still plenty of conflict to go around. Say Mad Mother has a group who's infiltrated the Glam scene with this sappy bubble-gum, mind-numbing pop. Say that they're good. Really good. And it's up to your PCs to out-play them on the Glam scene before their fans go over to the infiltrator's brand of insidious Mad Mother bubble gum pop (think Elton John vs. Ziggy Stardust). In such a setting, combat might never occur but it's more a "battle of the bands" than anything else with each band trying to outdo each other musically, politically and publicity-wise.

[Mike Holmes]

What Scott said.

What makes physical conflict interesting is that it's about something that everyone cares about, life and limb. So just figure out what the characters hold dear, and make the conflict about that. Fortunately, once they're done writing up their characters with HQ, the answer will be right on their character sheets. Just look for the highest ability scores.

Mike

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

Whoops, forgot to reply to this thread earlier.

Rob, I think there's one aspect of the HeroQuest rules that would play a big role, for me, in getting my most favored aspect of Starchildren into play.

Relationships.

Don't get me wrong; I love the rock & roll and the whole fun thing of playing a concert and so on. But what I really want are all those messed-up, drug-ridden, sex-isn't-enough complicated interactions. Tragic ones, uplifting ones, bogus ones, etc, etc. Total Velvet Goldmine stuff.

Imagine a starchild who taps into people's idealistic fantasies when he/she sings. Imagine a human person who enters into a romantic relationship with the starchild, only to be cast aside for some frivolous reason ("ooh! a shiny thing!"), and who sees his or her emotional agony displayed for all to see in the songs of the next gig or concert. The starchild understands the pain only as art, and cannot understand the human person's resentment.

That sort of thing. HeroQuest can do it.

Best,
Ron

[RaconteurX]

Sounds like a terrific combination, Rob. HeroQuest is ideally suited for blistering guitar duels against corporate rockers, hacking corporation networks in search of dirty laundry, bouncing pirate radio signals around to evade jamming and detection, etc. It even handles all that stuff Ron mentions extremely well. ;)

Welcome to Club HeroQuest, baby...

[Rob MacDougall]

Hi folks. Greetings from 2074!

Thanks very much for the tips and encouragement on this thread, and my apologies for not answering all of you sooner. That was sort of rude, especially since I have made good use of all of your advice. I wanted to check back in and catch you all up on how it is going.

We've now played three sessions of our Starchildren/HeroQuest game, and it's going very well, though it is still not everything I want it to be.

I won't recap the events of all three sessions here but I will catch you up on how it's going in general. We have a wiki for the game here:

http://www.innocence.com/games/darling-wiki/index.php

(They're pretty much de riguer for each of my game group's games now.) There's lots of material about the game and the characters there. No short session summaries yet, but I plan to bang some out soon on the Wiki. I'll post another link here when they're done.

Anyway. How is the game going?

The Good:

The characters are fantastic.
I'm blessed with great players, and each one of their characters is funny and cool and absolutely individual. Everybody likes their own character and is entertained by the other characters, so that's working well. We have:

[*]Kai Summer: A hypertalented but crushingly inarticulate Starchild guitar prodigy struggling with the lure of the Darkstar and his own inner demons.[*]Jack Voltaire: A faded (human) star, a love god rendered hokey and irrelevant by the arrival of the Starchildren five years ago. Secretly the leader of Velvet. Has discovered he's dying of some mysterious condition and wants to go out with one final amazing show.[*]Mary Pagan: Ultra tough punk rocker struggling with her burgeoning fame. She's suddenly on Mother's radar, she's clashing with her Mob-backed management, and she's got a bitter rivalry going with:[*]Darling: A Ministry-created pop star, and inspiration behind the sinister youth counterrevolution known as the Beautiful Fascists. The epitome of robotic engineered commodified pop. She's secretly in love with her hated rival Mary Pagan.[*]Clio: A Starchild muse, relentlessly optimistic and a little bit dizzy, not quite capable of recognizing how grim Mother's world is. She has fallen in love with a earthling doofus and, convinced that he is actually the rock messiah Viv Vortex, imbued him with amazing powers.[*]Perry Trauser / Viv Vortex: The aforementioned doofus: he has received amazing rock messiah powers from Clio's love for him (which he does not particularly return) and is coming to believe that he is in fact "Viv Vortex," the fictional hero of a famous unfinished rock opera. [/list:u]
The setting is fun.
Everyone's really enthusiastic about the setting, I'm happy to say, and about my modifications to it. Pretending to be a rock star is just fun. It  seems to be an even more basic and viscerally satisfying activity than pretending to be a 18th level multiclassed badass dark elf. Virtually everyone has made a mix CD soundtrack for their character (I'm flipping discs like Paul Oakenfold during a session) and we've had a number of cool/goofy discussions on what all the different factions of 21st Century music sound like.

Like Ron said: Relationships are cool.
I insisted that everybody take a number of relationships, and these have been key in planning and moving the plot along. We have not one but two unrequited love things going on between the PCs alone (Darling for Mary, Clio for Perry/Viv), which is great. I actually wish we had more of these, and more intense individual relationships between the PCs and key NPCs too. Most of the players took relationships to groups and factions rather than individuals: were I to start again I would probably disallow this. Yes, you can still use a relationship to a group as a story driver, but it has less emotional oompf than a relationship with an individual. Group relationships encourage more of the conventional RPG "which faction are you a part of?" storys, rather than the kind of messed-up everybody-hurts-somebody-else love triangles / chains I really wanted to see in this game.


The Less Good:

Too many players.  
Not much to discuss here. It's just hard to juggle "screen time" for six PCs, each one often doing their own thing. We are generally quite entertained by each other and by each other's stories, so this is not a dire problem. But the crunch for limited screen time does exacerbate the next problem, which is:

Problems with the Rules.
Here's the main thing I was hoping for advice from this forum for: The Hero Quest rules are working OK for us but still seem clunky, and aren't quite accomplishing what I hoped they would. What I wanted when I chose HQ for this game was a ruleset that could put our focus squarely on musical talents and emotions and passions and relationships, but do so with some "mechanical rigor," if that makes any sense, so that the rolls and the numbers really had an impact. There are lots of simpler systems I could have used that would have amounted to rolling a few dice, doing some hand waving, and then doing fairly free-form narrating. But I wanted dice rolls to matter, for the rules to really impact the story, for people to hold their breath when the dice were rolled and groan and cheer when the numbers turn up.

What I fear we actually have in this game is the handling time of a fairly complex system, yet in the end I'm still rolling dice, doing hand waving, and then doing fairly free-form narrating.

A couple of particular sticking points:

Augments:
Before playing, this seemed to me one of the absolutely coolest things about the HQ system. But in play, I have yet to find an elegant, relatively quick way of totalling up augments. I have no problem with players piling on multiple augments on each roll. It's not "game balance" or anything that I'm concerned about. What I find slow in play is going down the list on every roll. "Can I augment with 'Party Like A Rock Star'? Can I augment with 'Fashion Sense'? Can I augment with 'Legion of Fans'?" And am I rolling "Play Guitar" augmented with "Work The Crowd" or "Work The Crowd" augmented with "Play Guitar"? Each of our PCs has a bunch of abstract, often semi-overlapping traits that could conceivably apply to almost every situation. So every roll we go through the same routine.

Also: I tried to encourage variable augments (where you roll to see the extent of your augment) at first, but I'm not sure the players quite understand how variable augments work yet, and in practice they almost always take the automatic Trait / 10 augment.

Consequences of Rolls:
In my original post I was worried about finding and exploiting opportunites for non-combat conflict. Scott, Mike, Ron, and RacX's advice was all quite right in this regard. It hasn't been hard at all to come up with conflict or opportunities to use the rules: we've had musical showdowns, fashion showdowns, publicity fights, tests of love, etc.

BUT I always feel I'm on my own as to interpreting the outcome of these rolls. If two characters have a contest to see who looks more fabulous coming into the club and one gains a minor victory, well, what does that mean? One reason the rules and rolls haven't really seemed to have impact is probably that I'm still applying the consequences of those rolls in a kind of haphazard manner.

This may well be my fault. I know I haven't been consistent about using the suggested mechanical penalties for defeats (-10% to appropriate skill, etc.) Do those of you playing Hero Quest uniformly use the mechanical penalties suggested in the rulebook for all contests, even sort of abstract or social ones like the ones described here?

Being the Rules Guy:
This is a social contract issue, hardly specific to Hero Quest, but it is coming up in this game I think. When a group takes on a new rules system and the GM is one of the few who owns the game, it's very easy for him or her to become "rules guy"-- the one who does all the calculations, looks up all the charts, interprets all the rules. The other players need not assimilate the rules - they just roll when told. I feel like my group has fallen into this pattern in this particular game, and I don't like being the sole rules guy when I'm GMing. I have enough to think about, ad libbing the plot of six overlapping storylines, etc.

As I say, this is largely a social contract issue, and one we'll solve in discussion with our group rather than on this forum here, but any thoughts or comments on having players take greater "ownership" of the rules in play are welcome.

Anyway, I've rambled on quite enough. Thanks for putting up with the length of this post, and I welcome any thoughts, comments, or commiseration. None of this should imply we're not having a blast. The game is going well. I'm enjoying it and so is everyone else I think. But I can see some things that could be improved, that's all.

play that funky music, earth boy...
Rob

[Mike Holmes]

Augments can be fun. They are for me, at least. There are a couple of tricks to making them an interesting part of the game. First, question augments a lot. Ask how the player thinks something applies. If they have no answer immediately say no, and move on to the next.

What happens is that players at some point start only citing those that really make the contest more interesting. Sure it's possible that the character's Estranged from Family relationship makes sense in some way to the contest in question, but it should only be brought up if it's really interesting in the context of the contest in question. In fact, get to the point where the players are pretty confidently listing abilites, and not asking about each one. If they ask if it's appropriate, ask them back why. What happens is that the player starts to understand that it's their job to come to the contest with an explanation for why they think that the ability makes sense (assuming it's not blazingly obvious that it applies), or not to bring it up at all.

What you want to get to is where the player looks over his sheet, and selects a few abilities that he knows make sense in the case in question. What you want to avoid is players going over their entire sheets to make sure that they didn't "Miss" something. Augmenting isn't about "winning" the contest, IMO. It's about displaying the character in an interesting way. If it's becoming boring, y'all are doing it wrong. A little.

Now, the thing is that if the group has the least little worry about losing contests, then they'll have the urge to find every last bit of character effectiveness that they can. So as narrator, you have to discourage this. There are a couple of ways to do this, but mostly they deal with the other area that you're having problems with, results of contests.

What you'll notice about the results of contests, mechanically, is that they give somebody a penalty. They call this injuring, but really it's just some mechanical penalty to some area. If you haven't been using this (and actually the book doesn't mandate it), I wholeheartedly suggest that in almost all contests that you inflict a mechanical result on somebody. And, yes, inflicting some of those "social" injuries, etc. More to the point, think in terms of how the target is negatively impacted by losing. Then assign a title to the penalty and record it. Like Embarrased -1. These then become modifiers if and when they make sense using the same criteria that you use to select whether an augment makes sense.

So, for instance, if a character is actually wounded by a blow that was described as a shot to the legs, give Leg Gash -10%. The neat thing about this is that while this impacts the character's running and perhaps combat, it wouldn't affect his skill at, say, convncing another character to do somethign. The point is that the narrow definitions of impediments like this mean that the character is never unable to be effective in some way. Basically losing in HQ is as fun (though different) than winning. Get to the point where the players understand this, and the long list hunts will stop.

One tactic to get players to understand this is to crush them. That is, have something really tough come along and have the PCs get into a conflict with this big stat. In your game, say it's some really good recording industry exec. The contest is to get a favorable contract with him. He has a Negotiate 10W3 ability, however, and augments bring him up to 18W3. Lets say that the players lose against him with a Major Defeat. Give them a Unfavorable Contract -50% that applies whenever they try, say, to collect royalties and the like.

Basically they should see that no matter what the outcome of contests, it's cool. In this case they get the contract, but it's a horrible one. Now they have a goal to get it altered, or to break it somehow. Basically every negative that they acumulate this way becomes some new adversity to overcome. The neat thing is that these go away when the player "heals" them up, meaning often that they have to do some other contest to make these things go away (or even whole new "adventures"). Again, this is fun, and so players who see this don't try to "win" contests, so much as display their character in interesting ways. After a while the player gets to know the character, and declaring augments for contests becomes very quick.

One other tip for speed, do the accounting yourself. That is, while the player is listing augments, keep a running total yourself on a pad. Even better, good players who aren't in a scene or involved in the contest can keep the running total for those who are. This frees up the player in question to look for the augments he wants. Also, ask the players to learn the rules. This speeds things up immeasurably. I agree with you that this is just something between you and your group, and not HQ related. Is there some problem with asking them to learn the rules? Have a little training camp at some point if you think that'll work.

Using these things together, contests are pretty quick, but more importantly, everyone enjoys all of the time that it does take, no matter how long it takes.

Also: I tried to encourage variable augments (where you roll to see the extent of your augment) at first, but I'm not sure the players quite understand how variable augments work yet, and in practice they almost always take the automatic Trait / 10 augment.

Leave variable augments for the players who like to delve into mechanics. They're actually not beneficial to use in most circumstances, but let them if they understand how to do it and want to. In practice, I almost never see these in play and we don't miss them since they were the standard in Hero Wars. That is, I wouldn't mind seeing one, but only if somebody thought it was important enough to use.

This is the same principle as the augment principle above - people should only be looking to incorporate more stuff if they think it's really more entertaining. Get rid of any incentives to play otherwise.

Mike

[neelk]

So, for instance, if a character is actually wounded by a blow that was described as a shot to the legs, give Leg Gash -10%. The neat thing about this is that while this impacts the character's running and perhaps combat, it wouldn't affect his skill at, say, convncing another character to do somethign. The point is that the narrow definitions of impediments like this mean that the character is never unable to be effective in some way. Basically losing in HQ is as fun (though different) than winning. Get to the point where the players understand this, and the long list hunts will stop.

Cool. That's a very pretty trick I will have to remember when I run HQ.

[Bryant]

My idle player thoughts on some of these things:

Augments -- the character sheets ought to have the default augment values on 'em. I.e., each skill should look something like:

Play Guitar 10** (10)

With the number in parens being the value of the augment. That'd speed things up a bit.

Also, all the stuff Mike said.

Results -- I agree with you 100% on haphazard consequences. I think that this is what people are missing in the mechanics. For the benefit of all, here's the complaint some of the players have:

"If I have 10** and Bob has 19*, and Bob rolls a 5 while I roll an 11, Bob wins even though I have a better skill."

I know and I think the people complaining know that probability-wise, 10** will win more often. However, it feels to them like rolling low matters more than having a high skill. If Bob's marginal victory is narrated as a marginal victory, it might be clearer that there's no great loss there... it's just a momentary edge.

Fun -- I am having huge fun and intend to move wholeheartedly towards more entanglements with more people. I need Darling to do this, though.